Course Description: This course is an introduction to a functional grammar theory for the Spanish language from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). SFL is a social theory of language designed for use in educational linguistics, text analysis and interpretation. This functional description of grammar looks at language in terms of how it is used in ‘real situations’, i.e, considers language as a 'meaning making resource in social contexts'.

Texts used for authentic communicative interactions (e.g. newspaper articles, essays, public lectures, etc.) will be described to represent examples in the oral-written continuum of language. These texts will be used to describe the lexico-grammatical features that Spanish takes in different registers from the oral to the more written ones. The description of the three systems of Spanish grammar: ideational, textual and interpersonal will be presented.

The following are some of the topics that will be discussed in the course:
• Oral and written language
• Genre and register theory
• Register: field, mode, tenor
• Metafunctions: ideational, interpersonal, textual.
• Ideational metafunction
• Interpersonal metafunction
• Textual metafunction

Prerequisite: Consent of instructor; Spanish 205 and 206 recommended.

Format: Seminar - 3 hours; Term Paper.

Textbooks:

Readings will be on Smartsite

Spanish 224: Literatura Erótica del Siglo de Oro (4 units)

Adrienne MartínM 4:10-7:00P, 144 OlsonCRN 83349

Course Description: Early modern Spanish literature is particularly rich in erotic texts, in part due to the country’s multicultural past. In recent years previously disregarded erotic texts are in the process of being recovered and reinterpreted as templates for contemporary critical concerns.

In this seminar we will study the literary representation of sexuality and eroticism from the medieval and Golden Age periods and examine the critical categories by which it can be analyzed and evaluated. We will discuss distinctions between love and erotic literature; humor and eroticism; the discourse of eroticism; Arabic and Western treatises on love and lovemaking; courtly love; erotic autobiography; sex, the body and sensuality; the problematic categories of “eroticism,” “obscenity” and “pornography.”

Course Description: In this seminar we will examine a series of 20th and early 21st century Latin American, North American, and Caribbean novels that deal with cross-border issues, including immigration, exile, cosmopolitanism/localism, travel, and hybrid and multi-cultural identities. While the U.S.-Mexico border will be touched upon, we will spend far more time examining cases of border-crossing within Latin America, as well as between Latin America and other areas of the globe. Theorists and theoretical paradigms discussed include Edward Said on exile, Octavio Paz on pachucos, Gloria Anzaldúa on borderlands, and Juan Flores on Latino studies. Readings will be in Spanish and English.

Course Description: In this monographic seminar we will read as much of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz as time permits, sampling a generous portion of her poetry and drama and analyzing as well her few prose works (a series of letters). This Mexican nun produced her works at the height of the Barroco de Indias, in a Mexico just beginning to seek an independent national identity in the idealized Aztec past and becoming increasingly outspoken as criollos seeking political independence. Still deep in the militant religiosity of the Counter Reformation, Sor Juana’s New Spain roiled with contradictory tendencies in science, philosophy, theology, socioeconomic and political conditions, and in artistic expression. Sor Juana herself exemplifies at once the exaggerated floridness of the baroque and the cheerful, “paganized” simplicity of the carnivalesque, and a thematics at once secular and sacred. Her metaphysical thought rivals the complexity of John Donne’s; her baroque inventiveness surpasses that of Góngora and gleefully competes with Quevedo’s.

She undoubtedly represents colonial Mexico’s literary best and is arguably its most prestigious aesthetic figure as well of the nineteenth century and first part of the twentieth. She exercises a considerable influence on such contemporary giants as Rosario Castellanos and Carlos Fuentes. She has become a literary icon throughout Spanish America and among Spanish speakers of the United States. We will enrich our rigorously textual analyses with readings on the historical context in which Sor Juana worked, while being guided by notable critical and theoretical studies on this seminal figure in Hispanic letters, with special consideration of recent documentary findings.